The Blind Side (24 page)

Lucy Craddock bridled.

“Oh, my dear boy, that sounds as if we were two inquisitive old maids!”

“Why shouldn't one be inquisitive? I am, desperately, about Aggie—Rosalie—Craddock. What did you find out?”

“Very little,” said Lucy in a regretful voice. “Mary thought if we went to the theatrical agencies—but we didn't know their names of course, so we—we—well, my dear boy, we employed someone.”

Peter's eyes danced for a moment.

“A detective? Oh, Lucinda!”

Lucy blushed.

“Oh, no, indeed—a private inquiry agent—
discretion guaranteed
—really quite a gentlemanly man. And all he found out was that she had a sister married to a corn-chandler in Hoxton, and that there was nothing against either of their characters—which of course was very disappointing.”

Peter roared with laughter.

“Lucinda, you're a jewel!”

“Oh but—my dear boy—I didn't mean that at all. I mean—well, of course one wouldn't have wanted her to have done anything dreadful, but of course after all that trouble and expense—well, you know what I mean.”

“Perfectly,” said Peter. “And was that all?”

“Except the photographs,” said Lucy Craddock in an abstracted voice. “Now I wonder whether dear Mary kept the photographs.”

“I should think,” said Peter out of a bitter experience, “that Mary always kept everything.”

“They were in a yellow cardboard box, tied up with the ribbon from a most beautiful box of chocolates which John gave us for Christmas that year. I remember Mary wouldn't put them in the chocolate box because she said it was too good for pictures of Aggie Crouch, so she used it for her handkerchiefs.”

Peter's pulses jumped.

Gosh! Suppose he had burned those photographs. He hadn't, but just suppose he had.

A drop of cold perspiration ran down his spine. He said in a difficult, halting voice,

“The bulging yellow box—in the bottom of the wardrobe?”

Lucy nodded.

“Yes, that's where they'll be, if she kept them—and she always kept everything.”

Peter got up, looked at Lee's back, looked at the door, and without a word rushed out of the room and out of the flat.

Lucy stared after him in mild surprise, but Lee never turned round. She hardly knew he had gone, so far had she withdrawn from what was going on in the room.

And then Peter came back. He had the box in his hands—an aged, battered affair with one side gaping. And he was thinking that very likely this old battered box held two people's lives—Bobby Foster's life and—better not think about the other—better just keep on thinking about Bobby. He came across the room with an odd eager look on his face, plumped down on his stool again, and set the cardboard box across Lucy Craddock's knees.

Lee turned round from the window and came slowly over to them. She knelt down by Lucy's chair and sat back upon her heels. The feeling that something was going to happen was so strong that for the moment she had neither words, nor breath to say them with.

“Yes, that is it. I felt sure that Mary would have kept it—she always kept everything.”

Peter said, “Yes, she did,” in rather too heart-felt a tone. Then he untied the ribbon and pulled the lid off the box. A mass of small photographs cascaded into Lucy's lap. She contemplated them in a slightly bewildered manner and said,

“Oh dear me—all the other photographs seem to be in here too. I wonder when Mary did that.”

She picked up a faded
carte-de-visite
which showed a little, round-faced girl with straight hair taken back under a comb, a skirt with a lot of frills, and a tiny apron with two pockets.

“Dear Mary at the age of six,” she said in a tenderly reminiscent voice.

Lee got her breath.

“Oh! It's exactly like Alice in Wonderland—even the striped stockings!”

Lucy Craddock nodded.

“I think they are very pretty. And this is our father and mother taken on their wedding trip. I never remember him without a beard, and of course that makes a man look so much older, but here you see he has only those little mutton-chop whiskers, and I always think they were so very becoming. And this is my great aunt Sabina. Goodness—how frightened we were of her! You can see she looks very severe. She was so stout that she hardly ever got out of her chair, but she kept a strong ebony stick with an ivory knob beside her, and we used to be dreadfully afraid if we made a noise or did something she didn't like that one day she would come after us, all huge and angry with the black stick tapping.”

“Definitely a menace,” said Peter. “Now, Lucinda, fascinating as these reminiscences are, we haven't time for them just now. Let us have the life histories of our relations when we are not all expecting to be arrested. The only relation I feel I can give my mind to at the moment is Aggie Crouch.”

“Oh, my dear boy—not a relation!” protested Lucy Craddock in a horrified voice.

Peter looked at her reprovingly.

“My first cousin by marriage, Lucinda. Yours and Lee's a little farther off, but still definitely connected. Anyhow, I want you to concentrate on her and her photographs. Have we got to sort through all this lot to find them, or are they by themselves?”

Lucy Craddock looked quite shocked.

“Oh, by themselves—dear Mary would never have mixed them up with our relations. I think at the very bottom of the box, in one of those thin light-coloured envelopes.”

Peter turned the whole box over. A full-sized cabinet photograph of great-uncle Henry Albert Craddock slid unnoticed to the floor, aunts and cousins overflowed into the seat of the chair. The light, thin envelope wavered upon the top of the pile. Peter picked it up and read an endorsement in faded ink:

“Photographs of Ross's wife under her stage name of Rosalie La Fay.”

There were three photographs inside. Peter put in his hand and took one of them out. It was rather like taking a lucky dip, but there was nothing lucky about the draw, which was a hard, highly glazed photograph of a plump young woman in tights, with an enormous feathered hat upon her head. There was a fuzz of hair under the hat, a pair of rolling eyes very much made up, and a smile which displayed a great many not very even teeth. His heart sank like lead. The monstrous idea which he had entertained flew out of the window as he handed the picture to Lee with a casual,

“Well, I don't think much of Ross's taste.”

“She was supposed to be a very clever actress,” said Lucy Craddock in a doubtful voice!—“very versatile. She was in a repertory company somewhere up in the north, I believe, but when she came to London she couldn't get any work there. I haven't seen the photographs for years, but I think there's one of her as an old woman. The one Lee has got was when she was principal boy in Puss and Boots.”

Peter fished again, and got a severe-looking person with every hair strained back from her face and a heavy pair of spectacles on her nose. The figure had an angular look. The tight lips were primmed.

Miss Lucy nodded at the picture.

“You would never think it was the same person, would you? But it is. It was some play in which she took the part of a schoolmistress. She really was very versatile. See how different she can make herself look.”

Peter took out the third photograph. As he put his hand into the envelope, Lee turned her eyes upon his face. An agonizing suspense took hold of her. It seemed to slow everything down—the beating of her heart, the movement of Peter's hand, her power to think.

She saw Peter's hand come out of the envelope with the third photograph. She saw him look at it. She saw his face stiffen and then suddenly, violently change. She found voice enough for his name, but he drowned it.

“It's true!” he said. “After all—after all—it
is
true!”

Lee said, “What?”

He got to his feet, came round behind Lucy Craddock's chair, and leaning over her held the photograph where all three of them could see it. It showed a scraggy-looking female in a battered hat, a down-at-heels dress, and a torn apron. There was a straggle of grey hair beneath the hat. A draggled crochet shawl was clutched about the neck with one hand, the other held a dustpan and brush.

Lucy Craddock said in rather a dazed voice,

“She took the part of a charwoman in some play whose name I have forgotten.” Then she gave a little gasp and said, “Oh, my dear boy!”

Lee kneeled up straight. Her feet and ankles had gone to sleep. She couldn't feel them at all, but she couldn't feel the rest of her body either. Only her hand shook and shook as she put it up to find Peter. Her voice was quite steady and clear as she said,

“It's Mrs. Green.”

CHAPTER XXXV

There was a dead silence. They all looked at the picture.

Peter was the first to speak. He said, “Well, it lets Bobby out,” and with that he went through to the hall and took the telephone down from its hook.

Lee got painfully to her feet. They were quite numb. Her mind felt like that too. If Mrs. Green was Ross's wife, Aggie Crouch, then what was she doing here pretending to be Mrs. Green? And where was she now?

She heard Peter at the telephone, and then she heard the click as he put the receiver back. He came in and picked up the photograph. It had fallen into Lucy Craddock's lap, where it lay in that proximity to the Craddock relations which the refinement of Miss Mary Craddock's taste had proscribed. A portion of Aunt Sabina's crinoline obscured the dustpan and brush. The head with its battered hat had come to rest on the proud shoulder of Uncle Henry Albert. He said,

“Lamb is coming round. Well, I suppose this lets us all out. Amazing—isn't it?”

Lee said, “It doesn't prove she did it.”

“It will make the police sit up and think a bit. And she's rather given herself away by disappearing. Just a little bit too clever, that business of ringing up Scotland Yard saying she'd got some hush-hush evidence, and then working off the piece about being frightened of me, and of poor old Rush. The damnable thing is that it might have come off. Lee, do you realize how very easily it might have come off? By gum, she's a clever woman! What was it Lucinda said—very versatile? I'll say she is. She probably came down here in the first instance to spy out the land. Ross wouldn't give her any more money, and she may have wanted a line on him for blackmail, or even for a divorce. I wonder if she bribed old Mother What's-her-name to retire and let her in here as charwoman. Ross hadn't seen her for twenty years by all accounts. Mrs. Green was an ironclad disguise, and she put on the port-wine mark just to make quite sure. I don't suppose Ross ever really got a look at her. She had nothing to do with his flat, and it would be easy enough to keep out of his way. Even if he passed her on the stairs, she'd only got to go down on her knees and start dusting between the banisters or something like that. I shouldn't think he ever saw her face, but he might have seen it a dozen times without recognizing her. He probably remembered her like this.” He reached over for the first photograph and gave a short laugh. “Tights, curves, eyes, teeth, hair—not much there that you would connect with Mrs. Green, is there? Well, there she was. And all the time someone was moving around from one lot of cheap lodgings to another, calling herself Rosalie La Fay, forwarding Aggie's letters to old Prothero, and getting his answers back. I wonder who it was. Didn't you say there was a sister?”

“Yes,” said Lucy Craddock in a flustered voice—“oh, yes, a sister—but I don't remember her name.”

Peter nodded.

“Probably the sister then. Anyhow somebody she could trust to hold her tongue and do what she was told. Then Aggie gets her opportunity. She finds Ross's key sticking in the door of his flat. She pinches it, and when Ross and Peterson are both out of the way for the day she goes in and has a good worry around. It was easy enough to dodge old Rush, because he's got his settled times for everything, and she'd know what they were by then. Well, we know that Ross left his own bunch of keys lying about that day. That's what he had the row with Rush about. He saw his papers had been meddled with and he accused Rush—‘Clean forgot himself Mr. Ross did,' as the old boy put it to me. But it was Aggie. It must have been Aggie. And the first thing she saw when she opened that despatch-case was old Prothero's letter urging Ross to make a will, and saying that the unsettled property amounted to a very considerable fortune and he ought to provide against any possibility of an intestacy. Mrs. Green mightn't have made much of that letter, but you can bet your life that Aggie sucked it dry. If she was in any doubt she had only got to get the sister in Birmingham to go and ask the nearest solicitor. She could have copied the letter without names, or with different names, and have asked what the position of a widow would be if the husband died leaving a lot of unsettled property and no will. And I expect it was right there that she began to think of being Ross's widow in desperate earnest. I don't know how she brought it off all the same. She went home, and she went to bed drunk at half past nine. But I suppose she probably wasn't really drunk at all, and allowing for that—”

Lee caught him suddenly by the arm.

“The Connells' flat!” she said in a breathless voice.

All this time Lucy Craddock's eyes had been round and fixed. They did not leave Peter's face, but they did not really appear to be seeing him or anything else. She blinked rapidly now, and said in a small, obstinate voice,

“Oh, no, my dear, the Connells were away. And in any case—”

“Not the Connells,” said Lee—
“their flat
. Mrs. Green—she had their key. She said so when she was going off on the Tuesday night. She said she had just finished cleaning up after them, and Rush was furious because she didn't give him the key before she went. You know she had one of her bad turns, but I suppose it was just acting really. I am sure she just went home and pretended to be drunk so that the other people in the house would leave her alone, but I think she slipped back here—Rush doesn't lock up till eleven—and hid in the Connells' flat. It—it's just underneath Ross's, and she would be able to listen and make sure that everything was quiet before she came out.”